Kind: captions
Language: en
for some people this room might be the
scariest place on Earth Behind These
black curtains are deadly spiders
hundreds of them
and what we're gonna do is poke them
make them angry and then suction the
Venom that appears at the end of their
really long fangs well this is about as
close as I ever want to get to a funnel
work and we're doing it for a very good
reason
this is a funnel web spider they live
around Sydney which just happens to be
one of Australia's biggest cities and
they build underground burrows which are
distinctive because of the funnel shape
of the web at the entrance hence the
name funnel web but because they feel
safe in dark cool places they can end up
having unexpected run-ins with people
what happens is during the breeding
season the male funnel web will leave
his borrow and he moves around only at
night looking for the females but
sometimes he gets you know a bit um a
bit adventurous and he might leave his
borrow go too far from it and so in the
morning once the Sun starts to come up
he's too far from his burrow to go back
to it so he kind of has a little freak
out and has to find somewhere temporary
to hide out during the day and so what
he'll do is he'll head into a nice dark
safe spot like a pile of clothing or a
pair of shoes on the ground you'll often
see Australians bang their shoes
together before putting them on just in
case
if you are unlucky enough to get bitten
it'll be painful because their fangs can
be up to one centimeter long that's
longer than many snake fangs
and the Venom delivered is fast acting
and deadly we only milk the males
because they are six times more toxic so
the males Venom actually produces a
higher quality anti-venom so the fastest
time that we've seen an adult die from a
male funnel web spider was about 76
minutes so just over an hour so it's a
very fast acting rapid Venom ideally you
want to stay calm still and apply a
pressure immobilization bandage and then
get to the hospital as soon as possible
the Venom contains a mixture of proteins
notably the Delta hexotoxin as it
travels through your bloodstream you'll
begin to sweat twitch salivate and get
goosebumps this is because the Venom
acts on nerve cells neurons under normal
conditions neurotransmitters trigger
neurons to open ion Gates and positively
charged sodium ions flood in the
dramatic swing from negative to positive
triggers the release of
neurotransmitters to the next neuron and
then the ion gates close and the cell
returns to its resting state but funnel
web Venom stops the ion channels from
closing so the neuron unleashes a flood
of neurotransmitters like adrenaline
throughout the nervous system so muscles
normally under precise control receive
rapid chaotic signals causing them to
tense up or spasm which is a big problem
for the heart which begins to pump
faster raising blood pressure and
spreading the Venom further around the
body
and eventually your body runs out of
neurotransmitters
without them nerve cells can no longer
tell muscles what to do so you're
effectively paralyzed and it's only a
matter of time before your heart or your
lungs give out
humans are particularly unlucky final
web Venom is not that deadly to most
mammals if something like your dog or
your cat or a rabbit gets bitten by a
male funweb spider even even the male
they'll show very few symptoms and then
you could also be bitten by the exact
same spider and be in a very severe way
and that's because the effects of Venom
are very species specific Delta
hexotoxin binds to a specific site of
the sodium ion channels in primates
which Causes Chaos but that same spot
isn't there in other mammals The
lethality of this Venom in humans seems
to be an accident it only affects
invertebrates which are their prey and
also primates so it's really toxic to
monkeys and apes and of course we are
extremely badly affected by that
the first people arrived on the
continent around 70 000 years ago but
this spider evolved 40 million years ago
and it just happens to be extremely
deadly to people
so it seems like an unfortunate
coincidence that Venom originally
evolved for Effectiveness against
insects turns out to be deadly for us
the people here at the Australian
reptile Park try to prevent that by
making life-saving anti-venom but to
produce it requires collecting Venom
from their stalk of spiders we actually
rely exclusively almost on public
donations in order to keep the
collection going all of these spiders
would have been caught up by someone
that has found it in their backyard or
in their swimming pool or something like
that you heard right funnel web spiders
can actually survive underwater for up
to 30 hours they do this by trapping
tiny air bubbles in the hairs on their
abdomen so if you see a funnel web
spider at the bottom of a swimming pool
that doesn't necessarily mean that it's
dead
much more efficient for us to have
spiders handed in that are already
adults they're moving around they're
mature males and we can start milking
them straight away we haven't had to do
any of the work to raise them and then
yeah we'll milk them for that that
period of time here's how you do it
first you poke it
so that's kind of the funnel-web spider
defensive stance they'll raise in the
air like that and expose their fangs
sometimes they'll actually form drops of
Venom just on the tip of each Fang which
is when we come in with a tiny vacuum
you basically just use it as you would a
pencil and just stroke the the tip of
the thing with that
okay
I see that
yeah I got a little bit
well this is about as close as I ever
want to get to a funnel yeah
same with milk about 50 spiders a day if
you were saying each spider produced
four to five drops you know you're only
talking about maybe 250 drops of venom
what we've got in the end of the pipette
there now
would be enough to kill perhaps a dozen
or so adult humans
to get one vial of Anti-Venom they have
to milk 150 spiders by hand that takes
12 hours 12 hours
a spider to save one person exactly yeah
I mean I think that's worth it the Venom
is frozen and sent down to a lab in
Melbourne and there rabbits are injected
with it now although it's not as toxic
to rabbits as it is to humans they still
start with a low dose and then over a
period of six months they gradually
increase the dose as the rabbits build
up their immunity
and once they can withstand six times
the lethal dose their blood is collected
and it gets spun on a centrifuge to
separate out the antibodies and it is
these rabbit antibodies that form the
life-saving anti-venom rabbits and
people are similar enough that rabbit
antibodies can still neutralize funnel
web venom inside our bodies every year
around 40 people get bitten by
funnel-web spiders commonly from not
checking their shoes in the morning
unfortunately due to this program no one
has died since 1981 so for over 40 years
now we haven't seen a single death from
one of these spiders
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